His Honour Alan King-Hamilton

His Honour Alan King-Hamilton, who died on March 23 aged 105, was a robust and
outspoken Old Bailey judge who cultivated an eccentric image and seemed to
relish the publicity that attended his more provocative obiter dicta.

In the 1960s and 1970s he presided at several high-profile trials, including that of Janie Jones, the Kensington madam with a two-way mirror in her boudoir. He also tried the insurance swindler Dr Emil Savundra, the young Peter Hain (cleared on a charge of bank robbery) and presided at the Gay News trial for blasphemous libel, the last case of its kind in British legal history.

Although the Evening Standard once described him as exhibiting "the air of a rural dean", King-Hamilton retired in a whirlwind of controversy in 1979 after accusing the jury in the so-called Anarchists trial of being "remarkably merciful". The vetted jury had just acquitted four of the defendants in the face of what he felt was overwhelming evidence of their guilt.

After ordering the jury to return the next day to hear him sentence the one member of the gang who had pleaded guilty, King-Hamilton told them: "Now you know what you have done, I pray to God that none of you will ever have occasion to regret it."

His remarks brought loud complaints from the offended jurors and condemnation from many sections of the press: The Sunday Times went so far as to call it "a disgraceful epitaph to an undistinguished judicial career".

Perhaps anxious to set his epitaph straight, King-Hamilton later wrote his memoirs, And Nothing But the Truth (1983), in which he stood up for judges' "inherent right to make comments in their own courts on the cases with which they have been dealing".

He also recalled having received many letters deploring The Sunday Times's attack. Three QCs, meanwhile, had written to the newspaper explaining that if King-Hamilton occasionally attracted resentment, it was because he was "a strong and effective judge whose grasp of the human content of a criminal trial was never obscured by pedantry".

These qualities, along with his patience and willing industry, meant that King-Hamilton shouldered more than his fair share of high-profile trials during his 16 years on the Bench.

Among the most eye-catching was the Gay News trial for blasphemy in 1977, which arose after Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution against the magazine over James Kirkup's poem The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name.

It was the first prosecution for this offence in more than 50 years, and it seems inconceivable that the decision by the Administrator of the Old Bailey, Leslie Boyd, to put a Jewish judge in charge was anything but intentional. King-Hamilton himself never asked why he was chosen, but thought that, as a Jew, he was expected to be less offended than practising Christians by the poem, which described homosexual acts between a Roman centurion and Christ after the Crucifixion.

But despite his religion, King-Hamilton recalled being "shocked and horrified [by Kirkup's poem]. One didn't have to be a Christian to be revolted by it." He went on to describe his summing-up as "the best, by far, that I have ever given. I can say this confidently without blushing because, throughout its preparation, and also when delivering it, I was half-conscious of being guided by some divine inspiration."

The last trial for blasphemy had been in 1921, when a man named Gott was convicted at the Old Bailey for publishing a pamphlet in which he had described Christ entering Jerusalem as "like a clown on the back of two donkeys". The meagre report of the case was of scant help to King-Hamilton in deciding the numerous legal problems which arose during the Gay News trial.

The Gay News case aroused enormous public interest, both in this country and overseas. At the outset, John Mortimer, QC, for Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, moved to quash the indictment on the ground that since England had become a multi-religious society, there could no longer be an offence of blasphemy. King-Hamilton rejected this argument, saying that he would be prepared to extend the definition to cover similar attacks on some other religion.

After the defendants were convicted, he fined the magazine £1,000 and Denis Lemon £500. He also gave Lemon a suspended sentence of nine months' imprisonment, a term which he later conceded was wrong and which was overturned on appeal. The verdict was upheld by a majority of 3:2.

Although opposed to capital punishment, and relieved that he was never required to hand down a death sentence, King-Hamilton frequently scourged the liberal judicial establishment with his peppery approach to defendants in his dock. He scorned lenient sentences for armed criminals ("almost useless"), advocated bringing back the birch for thugs, and bemoaned, in a Hells Angels trial in 1970, the abolition of National Service.

On the other hand, he could effortlessly default to a display of "olde worlde" judicial charm: in 1966, after trying the longest and costliest trial involving income tax fraud ever heard at the Old Bailey (it lasted 81 days), King-Hamilton presented his traditional nosegay to the sole woman juror.

It was his habit to throw in the odd light remark to defuse tensions in court, in the belief that "it helps to restore a sense of proportion to the proceedings". This was not universally applauded: in the Gay News case, the cricket-loving judge upset friends of Denis Lemon by announcing to the jury the latest England Test score.

Myer Alan Barry King-Hamilton was born on December 9 1904 in West Hampstead, London, one of four children of a solicitor. Growing up before the Great War, Alan recalled travelling about London in hansom cabs and seeing loaded haywagons parked in the middle of Haymarket. He and his three sisters were looked after by French governesses.

He went to Haberdashers' Aske's school for a year at the beginning of the war, from where he witnessed the red glow in the sky one evening when Lieutenant Leefe-Robinson of the Royal Flying Corps shot down the first Zeppelin over Cuffley, for which he was awarded the VC. Picture postcards of Lt Leefe-Robinson, and also of his fiancée, subsequently became very popular.

King-Hamilton later went to Bishop's Stortford Grammar School, and then to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he took a Third in his Law Tripos, "thus providing further evidence," he later wrote, "if any were needed, to prove that it is not essential or even important to get a First, or even a Second, to succeed at the Bar".

Much of his time at Cambridge was taken up debating at the Union Society, of which he was president immediately after Patrick (later Lord) Devlin and before Selwyn Lloyd (later Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Commons). The first debate of his term was on Spiritualism, and pitted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle against Professor JBS Haldane.

After coming down, King-Hamilton spent six months at the solicitors Joynson-Hicks, whose senior partner was the killjoy Home Secretary of the day, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, universally known as "Jix". Called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1929, he did his pupillage with Roy Fox-Andrews ("an old Trinity Hall man") before becoming a tenant at 4 Temple Gardens, an Oxford Circuit set.

In his first year, King-Hamilton amassed brief fees of 96 guineas, which rose to a remarkable 900 guineas in his second year and 1,200 guineas the year after that, thanks largely to a torrent of road traffic work which came his way from Joynson-Hicks.

One of their clients was the London General Omnibus Company, later London Transport, which also operated Green Line coaches. Part 4 of the Road Traffic Act 1930, dealing with licences for buses and coaches, was coming into force, and King-Hamilton was briefed in most of Green Line's applications before the Traffic Commissioners where the railways opposed them.

In his third year he earned well over 2,000 guineas, but he realised the beano couldn't last and encouraged his clerk to get him into county court and circuit work. By the end of the Thirties, he was astonished to find that he had appeared before almost every tier of jurisdiction in the country, both civil and criminal.

King-Hamilton's wartime service began as a press censor in the Ministry of Information and ended in a security section of RAF Intelligence – where his fellow officers included the dramatist Ben Travers – in the rank of squadron leader. After being demobbed, he returned to the Bar, taking Silk in 1954. He defended several men accused of capital murder, but Victor Terry, a 19 year-old who was found guilty of shooting and killing a security guard while robbing a bank, was the only client he lost to the hangman. King-Hamilton was elected Leader of the Oxford Circuit in 1961.

In his memoirs he recounted with warm approval the story of a police sergeant who let him off for speeding with the words: "Dog can't eat dog, can it, sir?", apparently unaware that those outside the police or legal fraternity might be rather shocked by the tale.

After gaining judicial experience in the successive Recorderships of Hereford, Gloucester and Wolverhampton, and as deputy chairman of Oxford County Quarter Sessions, King-Hamilton became a Commissioner of Assize in 1963 and the next year was appointed one of the first two Additional Judges of the Central Criminal Court.

One of his early cases on the bench was the trial in 1968 of the insurance swindler Dr Emil Savundra, described in the press as a "bon vivant, brilliant financier and compulsive crook". He stood accused of having helped himself to funds paid as premiums, leaving 400,000 of his clients uninsured.

King-Hamilton later admitted to having been much charmed by Savundra, who had been interviewed by David Frost the previous year and was filmed by a BBC film crew during his trial.

On occasion while giving evidence in court, Savundra, a Sri Lankan, became notably excitable, and once he turned to King-Hamilton and said: "I'm sorry, my Lord, but it's very difficult trying to behave like an Anglo-Saxon when you are not one."

But after Savundra had been found guilty, King-Hamilton set aside his sympathy for the defendant (who was by then ill) and sentenced him to eight years' imprisonment. "You were as ruthless as you were unscrupulous," the judge told him. Savundra was released in 1974 and died in 1976.

King-Hamilton was perhaps less sympathetic towards another defendant, Peter Hain, the then president of the Young Liberals, who was charged with snatching £490 from a branch of Barclays Bank in Putney in 1976 (King-Hamilton's account of the trial in his memoirs is tinged with a personal interest which might easily have been mistaken for animus).

The trial lasted two weeks, during which every seat in the court and public gallery was filled. In the end, Hain's defence of mistaken identity was upheld and he was acquitted.

Shortly afterwards he published a book, Mistaken Identity, in which he accused King-Hamilton of having been prejudiced and unfair.

Another of King-Hamilton's cases that caught the eye was the trial of the "singer and dancer" Janie Jones, on charges that she lured women into prostitution by false promises (that the men they were to have sex with could advance their television careers), blackmailed her clients and perverted the course of justice.

Convicted on the first and third counts, she was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment by King-Hamilton, who rebuked her when he thought she was making eyes at the all-male jury. While Jones had cheered up the nation during the Winter of Discontent with tales in the papers about her two-way bedroom mirror and pink Rolls-Royce, King-Hamilton took a beadier view, branding her the most evil woman he had ever met.

He also presided at the Bank of America armed robbery trial ("a brute of a case to handle"), at the end of which he sentenced one of the defendants to 23 years, another to 21 years and the remaining three to a total of 47 years. The sentences were slightly reduced on appeal.

In another case, he regretted that courts could not put offenders in the stocks to make them look ridiculous: bullies, he suggested, should wear a placard saying "I am a bully". After a particularly nasty case of rape, he postponed sentence for two hours, saying that he felt so distressed and angry that "I would not trust myself in my present state of mind to pass a proper sentence".

King-Hamilton believed the lowering of the minimum age for jurors to 18 in the mid-1970s led to many more acquittals, and thought youthful jurors were "not ready to exercise the degree of responsibility required". He was greatly exercised by jurors of any age who failed to stay the course during lengthy trials, and suggested three extra jurors should be installed in a separate box, so that if one of the original 12 fell out, a substitute would be immediately available, thus sparing everyone a retrial.

If his remarks were occasionally controversial, his manner on the bench was almost invariably courteous and patient, and, unlike some other judges, he seldom showed boredom.

After his retirement in 1979, Alan King-Hamilton appeared on television as an arbitrator in the Channel 4 series Case on Camera. He remained a prominent figure in the Reform Jewish community, and became the oldest member of Our Society, the dining club for crime fanciers founded by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Musing in old age on his favourite fantasy dinner party, King-Hamilton placed Dr Savundra between Cleopatra and Dame Edith Evans.

He married, in 1935, Rosalind Ellis, who died in 1991. He is survived by his two daughters.